42 research outputs found
Tyrosinase and carbonic anhydrase enzymes inhibition studies of vanadium(V) complexes
No full textPresent study endeavors synthesis of series of vanadium(V) hydrazide complexes and its enzyme inhibition studies. Octahedral structure of complexes has been evaluated previously using conductance measurements, spectroscopic techniques involving IR, 1H-NMR and 13C-NMR, elemental analysis using CHN technique. Complexes 1c-12c have found to exhibit monomeric form with hydrazides behaving as bidentate ligand coordinating by their N and O atoms, while two oxygen atoms have also been found to show attachment with the metal centre. This study includes activity of vanadium(V) complexes to inhibit tyrosinase and carbonic anhydrase enzymes. For inhibition of carbonic anhydrase all, while for tyrosinase most of the hydrazide ligands were found to be inactive. Vanadium(V) complexes with these hydrazides have found to bear variable degree of carbonic anhydrase and tyrosinase inhibition activity. Some of the vanadium(V) hydrazide complexes were found to be potent inhibitors of tyrosinase enzyme and carbonic anhydrase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of Journal of the Chemical Society of Pakistan is the property of Knowledge Bylanes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)S. Sultan is thankful to the Higher Education Commission for indigenous scholarship No. 112-34080-2PS1-155 under PhD fellowships for 5000 scholars, HEC (Phase-II). Authors are thankful to the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan for financial support (‘The National Research Grants Program for Universities’, Grant No. 1862/R&D/10)
Nongovernmental organizations and health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa
No full textThis paper attempts to present the distinctive characteristics - both positive and negative - of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as institutions for providing health care. It reviews the historical role of NGOs as vital contributors to health care delivery in Africa and looks at how the current environment has brought NGOs to the fore. It analyzes the implications of the trend among donors to channel resources to developing countries through NGOs and discusses various policy options governments have employed in relation to NGOs. Finally, it raises some unanswered questions about environments conducive to NGO activity and contributing to roles that NGOs can be encouraged to fulfill without sacrificing their very strength in the development process.Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Housing&Human Habitats,Regional Rural Development
Filling the gap between NIMS/ICS and the law enforcement initial response in the age of the urban jihad
No full textCHDS State/LocalThe National Incident Management (NIMS) and Incident Command Systems (ICS) are important tools that can be adapted to establish command and control in coordinating some aspects of the response and recovery phases of many major incidents, including some types of terrorist attacks. These command and control paradigms, however, are heavily reliant on communications technology and other social and organizational preconditions, and may fail to adequately support the initial law enforcement response to some types of incidents, such as the attacks that occurred in Mumbai, India and Lahore, Pakistan. This thesis will suggest that recent developments in tactics employed by terrorists in India, Pakistan and elsewhere demand an urgent re-examination of the urban policing model currently employed in the United States. The American urban policing model is well suited for response to ordinary domestic criminal activity and, through the use of command and control tools such as NIMS, works adequately for many unusual occurrences. The NIMS-based model alone, however, including the current National Response Scenarios, seems ill suited for response to acts of paramilitary terrorism. American law enforcement may require a supplemental response paradigm that envisions an effective initial response when faced with degraded communications capabilities and uncertain command and control structures.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Las Vegas (NV) Metropolitan Police Department author (civilian)http://archive.org/details/fillinggapbetwee10945518
Trade union participation in the PRSP process
No full textThe Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach offers an opportunity for civil society organizations, to join governments in the development, and implementation of poverty reduction strategies. Trade unions have been encouraged to participate. This report notes that most unions have been invited to the discussions leading to formulation of the PRSPs, but none has been included in the drafting, implementation, monitoring, or evaluation. Based on findings from 23 PRSP countries, the study identifies a number of weaknesses, and shortcomings which have limited the effective participation of trade unions, mainly capacity issues, time constraints, and lack of structured participatory processes. Lack of consensus on contentious issues like privatization, pensions reforms, and labor code reform, have been worrisome to some unions. The paper calls for, among other things, more dialogue between the labor movement, and the International Financing Institutions (IFIs), strengthening trade unions, building union capacity, and more analytical work on labor market policies, and core labor standards.Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Management and Relations,Politics and Government
(A131) Surgical Help to Children in Disasters and Wars
No full textPurposeTo describe results of experience in providing surgical aid to children in technological and natural disasters in various countries of the world: Haiti, Algeria, Armenia, Afganistan (three times), Georgia, Egypt, Russia, Indonesia (twice), Iran, Pakistan, India, Japan, Gaza strip, Chechnya, and Yugoslavia.Materials and MethodsThe Russian specialized team consisting of highly qualified pediatric specialists (traumatologists, neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, specialists in wound treatment, anaesthesiologists-reanimatologists and others if necessary) work at local hospitals in the disaster zone. All of them work as volunteers. The most serious pediatric victims were concentrated in one or two regional hospitals. The volunteer specialists work on a twenty-four hour basis together with local doctors. Every day they examine patients, control wound bandaging, and perform surgeries. For long tubular bone fractures metalosteosynthesis is used. Modern techniques are used for Crush syndrome and for extended and purulent wounds (water-based ointments, early autoplasty). Currently, the main difficulty in many cases is primary treatment of extensive wounds with their complete closure and the many indications for amputations. Conservative and sparing techniques are not often used.ConclusionsPediatric victims in technologic and natural disasters must be helped by pediatric specialists. Our experience in the countries to which we have responded have revealed that there are not enough local specialists who can provide highly professional aid to children. There is no known coordinating structure in the world to efficiently organize specialized pediatric help to children in disasters and wars.</jats:sec
The Ideology That Binds Us: The Role of Ideology in Violent Nonstate Actors Alliances
No full textFor many years, experts and policymakers have been puzzled by the phenomena of violent nonstate actors. Violent nonstate actors are often secretive, competitive, and antagonistic towards one another; it is difficult to comprehend why they might be prepared to collaborate for a shared purpose. The scholarship has established that ideology is a crucial determinant of violent nonstate actors' organizational structure, behavior, and decision-making processes. The idea of homophily is one of the most critical ways in which ideology impacts violent nonstate groups. Based on network studies that highlight the significance of homophily in forming alliances, the group's ideology plays a substantial role in locating allies and coordinating actions. Particularly, ideological similarities facilitate collaboration. Using MMP data and BAAD data, this study investigated 83 VNSAs from three examples to examine the thesis question: 35 VNSAs from Pakistan, 33 VNSAs from Italy, and 15 VNSAs from Colombia. This study explored patterns of violent nonstate actors' collaboration across three case studies: Pakistan between 1970 and 2019, Colombia between 1960 and 2019, and Italy between 1950 and 1989. This study traced the formation of coalitions through various times following VNSAs ideologies using network analysis. The findings indicate that ideology significantly predicts collaboration between violent nonstate actors regardless of context. Notably, this study discovered that parties with similar ideas were more inclined to work than those with opposing ideologies. In addition, this study found that this trend was consistent across different periods and geographical locations. These outcomes have significant significance for policymakers and researchers attempting to comprehend and combat the incidents of violent nonstate collaboration. By acknowledging ideology's role in establishing these alliances, governments may devise more effective tactics for combating terrorism and supporting peace and stability. In addition, by comprehending the function of homophily in forming ties between terrorist groups, academics can build a more nuanced understanding of the social dynamics behind terrorist group conduct.Embargo status: Restricted until 06/2025. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link
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Diminishing Returns and Deep Learning for Adaptive CPU Resource Allocation of Containers
No full textContainers provide a lightweight runtime environment for microservices applications while enabling better server utilization. Automatic optimal allocation of CPU pins to the containers serving specific workloads can help to minimize the completion time of jobs. Most of the existing state-of-the-art focused on building new efficient scheduling algorithms for placing the containers on the infrastructure, and the resources to the containers are allocated manually and statically. An automatic method to identify and allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers can help to improve the efficiency of the scheduling algorithms. In this article, we introduce a new deep learning-based approach to allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers automatically. Our approach uses the law of diminishing marginal returns to determine the optimal number of CPU pins for containers to gain maximum performance while maximizing the number of concurrent jobs. The proposed method is evaluated using real workloads on a Docker-based containerized infrastructure. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in reducing the completion time of the jobs by 23% to 74% compared to commonly used static CPU allocation methods. 2004-2012 IEEE.Manuscript received April 30, 2020; revised September 28, 2020; accepted October 19, 2020. Date of publication October 22, 2020; date of current version December 9, 2020. This publication was made possible by NPRP Grant # NPRP9-224-1-049 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) and a graduate fellowship from the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan to MA. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was T. Inoue. (Corresponding author: Waheed Iqbal.) Muhammad Abdullah, Waheed Iqbal, and Faisal Bukhari are with the Punjab University College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore 54590, Pakistan (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).Scopu
Stylistic Analysis of Ahmed Ali’s Short Story Our Lane
No full textThe undertaken study is based on stylistic analysis of Ahmed Ali’s short story Our Lane. The study analyzes how the author has used linguistic features like noun, adjective, conjunction, sentence complexity to portray the social, political, economic, religious, psychological and cultural conditions of the colonized natives of the Indian subcontinent in the wake of the British colonial rule. The story portrays how the colonial rule has deteriorated the people socially, economically, politically and psychologically. Ahmed Ali’s use of adjective is in consonant with the established norm of using 7 to 8% of the total text (Hofland & Johansson, 1987:6). Whereas, the median of 343 sentences is 13, which is shorter than the length of an average modern sentence, which according to Ellegard is 17.8 words. While rebutting colonial narrative, he deviates from the standards of English language: excessive use of coordinating conjunction ‘and’ is evidence to it. Most adjectives of positive characteristics qualify to the past, whereas the adjectives referring to present are either of negative or of neutral characteristics, and thus the writer recognizes the glory of the past and condemns the disintegrating present and uncertain future in the colonized land
